by Karen Rivers
Nah.
She sticks with the poem. Prints it out with her name at the top all in capital letters in some fancy ass font she picked off the list just to piss him off. Done, she grins. She glares at the phone, willing it to ring. She hasn’t talked to X all day.
Call me, she says in her head. Call me call me call me call me.
The phone doesn’t ring.
Come on, come on, come on.
She’s hungry. She wants ice cream. Mint chocolate chip. If he calls, she can talk him into it. She can talk him in to anything, she figures. Come on, she croons to the phone. Come onnnnn.
She could call him, but she won’t. That’s not her style. Instead she paces around. Dances a bit. Turns on some music and really dances, bashing into the wall, knocking over an empty goldfish bowl where she’d been keeping interesting junk she found on the street: bottle caps and broken things. It feels so goooood to dance hard, rubbish digging into her through the soles of her boots. She dances until her dad bashes on the ceiling downstairs so loudly she can feel it in her feet.
She flips him off, even though he can’t see her. Then does the same to her quiet cell phone. Fuck you, she says, fuck you fuck YOU. She settles herself back down in front of the computer, sweaty and breathing hard. There’s a web-site that she heard of that shows you how to do prison tattoos with regular pen ink. She’s thinking of making a tattoo of an x on her upper arm. She’s drawn it out already. It’s not just an X, it’s fancy. Kind of Celtic, and kind of tribal. It’s going to rule, she thinks. She just has to solicit someone to help her so that it’s not all crooked.
Mira’ll do it, she figures. She just has to find some way to bribe her, or to blackmail her into not telling their mum and dad.
Get off the PHONE, Mum, she screams. I need to make a call and my phone is DEAD!
Then she settles into her internet daze, flipping from one page to the next until she finds exactly what she’s looking for.
Ruby
Chapter 3
You sit at the dining room table. The computer screen is blank. Obviously. In front of you, there is a glass buffet full of different glasses that the housekeeper keeps polished and glittering in spite of the fact that only one or two have ever been used. They’re pretty, the way the light bounces off them like water. It moves in a way that gives you vertigo. You watch until you realize the illusion of movement is just your shadow, shifting as you turn.
The clock in the living room ticks. It’s a cuckoo clock, which is incongruous in this otherwise angular glass and chrome setting. The little wooden bird lurches out and shrieks on the hour. It makes you jump every single time.
The TV is on with no sound, throwing colours in radiant patterns onto the highly shiny black enamel floor. In the silence, you can hear that you are alone. The air moves differently – cooler and scentless and somehow less friendly -- when your father isn’t home. He isn’t home very much, not lately. He’s very busy! He’s in demand! You can’t imagine what it must be like to be so popular, so wanted. Just last week, he was interviewed on national TV, some morning news show that apparently everyone in the world sees. People keep saying, “I saw your dad …” You are already getting used to nodding, saying “thank you” even though you’re not sure why you should be grateful. It’s nothing to do with you. Your father has written a book that at this exact moment is number four on the New York Times bestseller list. A funny, analytical book (that’s what the reviews say) about being a single father and about being a shrink and about a whole bunch of other things too personal to even contemplate. In a way – in most ways – the book is pretty much completely about you, which is why you’d rather stick a fork in your own eye than actually read it. The cover is bad enough: a girl who looks nothing like you staring at a candle flame, the flame itself reflecting in the girl’s eye like that old Drew Barrymore movie about the kid who lit things on fire with a glance.
On the other hand, you wish you could hand the book in to your teacher, in place of answering this impossible essay question: “Who are You?” It’s a sentence sort of answer, not even a paragraph. Not even an interesting sentence.
You type your name, which is all that springs to mind.
Ruby. I am Ruby.
That’s all you have.
You lean your face close to the glass tabletop and exhale. You make a perfect fingerprint with your index finger in the fog of your breath. If you were braver, you would take a picture of that and hand it in as your essay. Your fingerprint on the glass is as much “you” as anything else. Besides, you feel like this is one of those artsy philosophy kinds of questions that you should be able to answer in a “different” way. Turn the project into something else. If you were a teacher, you’d hand your students the question and tell them they could answer any way they wanted to, except by writing an essay. An essay is no way to answer that question for real. Anything you write down is going to sound stilted and dumb and clichéd and will also be full of lies.
Of course, lies tell as much about a person as the truth does.
Still, you want to do something different. A photo could be an answer but you don’t have a camera. A sculpture. A tower out of popsicle sticks or a collage of books you’ve read, movies you’ve seen, music you’ve heard, people you’ve met. A painting of yourself in the future. You imagine you could do something really wild, like cut off all your hair and mould it somehow into a face and hand THAT in. That would get everyone’s attention.
But that isn’t you. Not really. Besides, it all sounds like too much work.
You type a line of As and then a line of Bs.
I am a girl, you type slowly, dragging your fingers along the keyboard so that the sentence looks more like Io am, as girlk. And then you delete it using the backspace key, one letter at a time. Tap-tap-tap.
Which leaves you where you started. You backspace further until you have just your name. Ruby.
This super sucks, you say out loud. Why does it have to be so stupid and so hard?
It feels dumb to talk when there is no one there to listen. It makes you feel loopy, like you’re drunk or something. Not that you’d know, having never been drunk.
You write, My name is Ruby and I am drunk.
You go back and change “am” to “feel”. You don’t want the teacher turning you into the counsellor for having a drinking problem or “suspected drinking problem” or anything equally embarrassing.
What does “drunk” feel like, anyway? You’ve seen drunk people, you know what they are all about. Well, from a distance anyway. Up close, you’ve only really seen Joey Ticcato drunk. When he’s drunk, he likes to call you. To see you. Which is easy enough because he lives downstairs, but still it always makes you feel embarrassed. You don’t know what it means or what he wants. If you had a close girlfriend, you’re sure you would sit around for hours analyzing what he said and did, the way he looked at you or didn’t.
Sometimes you want to scream at him, “Do you SEE me? What do you WANT?”
Other times, most of the time, you’re just happy he wants to be around you. You listen while he talks. And talks and talks. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t. You watch him carefully, the way his hand sometimes drifts towards yours and then stops, like a magnet being pushed by its opposite pole. When he’s talking about something that’s really important to him, like a poem he’s writing, lyrics he’s trying to work out, his blue eyes flare up so bright they are like glass marbles, a colour that can’t exist but does.
This is what’s important: this strange need that you fill for him, even when you don’t really want to be there. Even when the smell of him makes you gag and when his stories make you cringe.
The down-side is that usually if he’s drunk enough to need to see you, he’s drunk enough to throw up. Once, lurching, he leaned in (you thought for one heart-stopping moment that he was going to kiss you, you could feel and smell his alcohol-hot breath) and tumbled past you, vomiting like he’d turn inside out. You didn’t know
what to do. So you patted his back until he jerked out from under your hand, mumbling “Leave me alone, just go away.” So you did, face burning, like you’d done something humiliating when really, if you think about it, it’s Joey who should have been embarrassed, Joey who should have run away and not looked back.
In any event, drinking doesn’t appeal to you. The drunk rambling: who would listen to YOU? The throwing up that seems inevitable, every party you’ve ever been to has ended with someone’s head in the sink, someone puking uncontrollably into the shrubbery on the front walk, someone crying in the bathroom, dry-heaving into the shower stall.
So from where you’re sitting, being drunk is as bad as food poisoning with a bunch of embarrassing acting out first. Being drunk makes you either cry and want to die or fall in love with everyone. Makes you dance and tell lies and embarrass yourself.
You delete the part about feeling drunk. You change it to “I feel crazy”, which is infinitely more honest.
This reminds you of a song that you used to sing when you were little. It started with “I am slowly going crazy” and was followed with a jumble of numbers. You try to remember it, but you can’t get all the words. The tune sticks in your head and you close your eyes and shake your head as though you could dislodge it that way.
Joey would remember. He keeps all that kind of stuff, stuff from when you were little kids. He remembers every detail. You’d think with all the drinking and puking, he’d kill some brain cells, but no. It’s all still in there. Somehow.
I am slowly going …
You wish you were crazy. Sometimes. Like controllably crazy, not out-of-control psych patient crazy. Sometimes you hope you are. That will give your father something shrink-like to work on that he can actually fix. You think he would be proud if he could fix you. He always seems disappointed that you aren’t particularly obviously broken. You’re a teenager. An adolescent. You’re supposed to do something outlandish, something wild. Sometimes he hints to you as to how you should behave such that he can discipline you (or “help” you) appropriately. You know that you are supposed to be different during this time. Difficult. Hard to get along with. You are supposed to sneak around getting drunk and acting silly. You are supposed to have an inappropriate boyfriend who you do dumb things with. You are supposed to accidentally get pregnant or arrested or better yet, both. Imagine the possibilities! He could have a whole series of wildly successful books about your antics.
If only you performed.
You delete again – tap-tap-tap – and you start over.
My name is Ruby, you write. But that is not who I am. Sometimes I feel like I wander far away from myself and I only come back accidentally.
You sit back and look at what you’ve written, which is true, but really does sound weird and off-putting, so you delete it also. The things you’ve deleted are probably more meaningful than what you’ll eventually write. You know your teacher is not looking for much more than a description. Hair colour, height, weight, hobbies, favourite books, movies, music. Something boring. Something safe. Yet you can’t bring yourself to type that information.
This particular teacher, you suspect, will think that he knows the class soooo intimately after reading these self-descriptors, especially if you give him more than he bargained for. You want to make him feel like he’s so radically reaching deeply inside everyone to find that precious golden nugget of truth. You want to do this, but in way that you somehow get the last laugh. Besides which, you can pretty much accurately guess that really he wants to know only about one person and assigned the entire class this project to get the one answer. This person that he wants to know about is Cat, who you’ve seen him staring at while you are doing “quiet work”. Most of his class is “quiet work”. Most of his time is spent staring. You wonder what he would say if you turned in a paper that says, “My name is Ruby. PS - I know about your stupid crush on Cat.” But there is nothing to know. Probably. And if there is, what do you care?
You think that Cat is oblivious to the staring because she is a girl who is stared at all the time, wherever she goes. The opposite of you in almost every way. She’s pierced and noisy. Colourful and jarring. She makes you look. She dares you to look. Her bracelets slam together like screen doors. Looking at her makes you flinch. She hurts your ears. Your eyes. She’s too much on the surface for you. You think she’s probably really afraid of something and putting up a false front. Or that’s what your dad would say, you’re sure of it. Frankly, your dad would probably kill to have a daughter like her. Such a project! You feel sorry for your dad that he got you instead: quiet, dependable, plodding you. He’d do better with in-your-face Cat, out there getting the attention that she craves. Scaring people with her bravado. Wanting to sit next to him on TV shows, laughing or screaming or raging at all the witty anecdotes about herself in a way that you never ever ever could.
You just aren’t like that.
You are invisible.
That’s the truth. Nothing is anything to do with you. Not really. Not even the book. Although each time you see that cover on the side of a bus or advertised in a magazine, your cringe is so all-encompassing that you feel like you’re collapsing into yourself, shriveling from humiliation like a slug that’s been sprinkled with salt.
My name is Ruby, you type for the tenth time. And I am invisible. Then you change it to “I want to be invisible.” Then you change it back.
This is hard, you say out loud to the TV, which is showing a Tampax ad that is populated by the shrieking kind of pretty happy girls that you would rather be than yourself. The kind of girls that actually, come to think of it, don’t really exist.
Ruby, you type.
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. Ruby is one of those names that after you say it over and over again in your head, starts to sound like nonsense. Like a word that you made up. A word like phlegm or flesh or gullet.
You stare fiercely at the screen until you start to see the floaters in your eyes more clearly than you can see the words. Your essay is shaping up (if you can call one sentence “shaping up”) to be just like you -- way more serious than you mean to be. You were sort of kidding when you wrote the line about being invisible. And sort of not. But that sarcastic, snappy tone you meant it in isn’t there. On the screen, in black and white, it looks like the kind of cry for help that would make your father crazy with joy. He could cure that!
The phone rings. It’s set to ring with Ode to Joy or some other classical junk you should know, but don’t. All those years of music lessons and you can’t even name the ring tone. The chiming and beeping of it is too much sound, the jangle of it makes your, heart pound somewhere up near your throat. You don’t answer it. You hardly ever answer the phone. You have your own cell phone and anyone you want to talk to will call you on that number. You can predict with 100% accuracy that the person calling is someone who is either currently dating your dad, wanting to date your dad, or used to date your dad. The machine picks up and you hear your Auntie A. leaving a long message.
You have about 20 “aunts” who aren’t actually related to you. “Aunt” is the title given – for reasons you never understood – by your dad to the wannabes. If they get serious enough, that is. It’s something they earn by sticking around for a year or more. Like a badge. Auntie A. was your father’s girlfriend from when you were four until when you were eight. She says you are like a daughter to her. That’s pretty weird, you think, because you feel next to nothing for her. Except sort of sympathetic. Your dad has moved on from her brunette, clean-skinned wholesome type to a more expensive looking type of large-breasted shiny-skinned robotic bottle-blonde. Unless she hits a plastic surgeon and a hairdresser, she has no hope. Besides, the job is temporarily filled, or so your dad says. And he’s excited about it, which is too nauseating to contemplate. This newest contender is some slut named Cassidy who you’ve never met. It doesn’t matter though, it’s just a matter of time. She’ll likely look and act exactly like an over-inflated Barbie, your father’s
taste is moving increasingly and horrifyingly in that direction. The last one, Gina, had skin so smooth and shiny it looked as though it had been made from melted wax. She practically smelled like plastic. Come to think of it, Gina didn’t want to be an “auntie”. She wanted you to not exist at all. This is another disturbing aspect of the trend: the bigger the boobs, the blonder the hair, the less YOU seem to matter at all.
It was almost better when they wanted to befriend you than Gina and her cold-shoulder. Her way of looking directly through you as though you didn’t even register.
You go to the kitchen and pour a glass of water and add plenty of ice, mostly because you like the icemaker in the freezer. When you were little, you used to fill buckets with the ice. Empty ice cream buckets, empty margarine tubs, whatever. The ice springing from its mysterious source never ran out. It was endless. You dumped it all into the tub and stuck your feet in it until they hurt and turned red and then bluish-purple and then stopped hurting. You poked your mottled flesh to make white prints on your skin. For a while your next door neighbours were a family from Japan, and the daughter, Yuki, would come over and you’d both stick your feet in ice together. This was when you were around six. When you think about it now, it seems incredibly weird that two six year olds were even allowed to do this. What if you had gotten frostbite? Then what? Nice responsible parenting, Dad, you think bitterly. Just terrific.
Now you drink the water slowly, crunching your ice cubes. You can’t drink water fast. If you have to swallow quickly, you always feel like you’re drowning. The crunching of the ice hurts your teeth and sounds too loud in the empty apartment. You make more noise on purpose, just to create a commotion. All your actions feel self-conscious to you, like you are playing yourself in a movie.
It’s terrible how quiet it is. Awful. It’s making you feel nervous. It makes you wish Yuki or someone else your age still lived next door. Somehow neighbour-friends are easier for you than actual friends. They are sort of default friends – kind of like Joey, come to think of it – friends you don’t have to work at or really participate with short of just simply living in the same building.